For far too long, I’ve heard progressives say we have to be polite when we contact the politicians who keep betraying us. For years, I’ve heard them say we can’t be “rude”, we have to be civil, we have to be respectful. Although they’ve acknowledged that war criminals and their enablers in Congress don’t deserve any respect, they insist that we have to be respectful anyway. That’s what we’ve been told, that’s what we’re still being told.
I’ve had my fill of that. This isn’t complicated. We can either be progressives, or we can be hypocrites. From what I’ve seen, being respectful hypocrites hasn’t accomplished a whole lot. Except for Kos, he has a Newsweek column now, and respectful hypocrite traffic at that Democratic Fan Club of his is at an all time high. This has been presented as an encouraging development, and who can possibly disagree, for as the graph below clearly demonstrates, there’s a direct correlation between higher Daily Kos traffic and spectacular Democratic triumphs in Washington . . .
Yet somehow, many Democrats still feel an extremely compelling urge to betray us. Bush and Cheney went on a crime rampage for 8 years, but Democrats won’t hold them accountable. They won’t prosecute Wall Street criminals for gutting our economy, they’re rewarding them for it. Our health care system is a travesty, the corporate media is a propaganda shithole, the Fed is a Machiavellian nightmare, rightwing madness is escalating, the fuse of economic collapse is still burning, and Congress is still a snakepit of corruption.
Whether the President wants to admit it or not,
You can see it in the paper, read it on the wall,
Hear it on the wind, if you’re listening at all.